


Peregrine

by asperityblue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, I know it's shocking, I know what you're thinking, I'm Sorry, M/M, Pining, Unrequited Love, he's not actually on drugs, i was just experimenting, nobody actually dies in this, nobody dies? where's the catch?, surrealism?, yeah it's not all fun and games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2482967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asperityblue/pseuds/asperityblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His voice is dry and rough at the edges and slices little paper cuts against his throat and tongue. The water stings the wounds as it drowns him.</p>
<p>John doesn't notice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peregrine

Sherlock strides, calm and composed, towards the bathroom. Behind him, he hears John sit down in his armchair and open the newspaper.

He gently nudges the door closed. It makes a faint click as he locks it. He walks in slow, steady steps to the shower, carefully shuts it behind him and twists the knob.

It spews streams of hot water, and he watches as the vapour creeps, fogging up the cubicle.

Then he promptly braces his forearms on the glass and hits his head against it. The sound is muffled and strange, a church bell inside a pillowcase. He wonders if he could shatter his skull by ramming it against the shower door. He knows he could probably, but won't. It would upset John. Not much fun, this caring lark. It's not the first time he's let it metastasize in his body and brain. He's terrified of John leaving him and constantly in wrenching pain because he will.

He practically already has.

Sherlock fights the loss when it comes for him, in feeble attempts at shoving it down, he tries to keep it back even though he knows fully well there's only one way to drain the ache from his brain and body. It's why he's here, after all. He lets the process begin tearing him apart, opening his wounds so he can operate on them.

He feels his chest tighten and seize, brings fingers up to claw at his ribcage through clothes which grow heavy as the water beats down. Empty, silent sobs claw through his windpipe and eye sockets, shove him to his knees, doubled over and breathing erratically. All he can hear is the tidal rush of terror and heartache and torn love bleeding out his ears.

Outside the universe that is the bathroom of flat 221b, Baker Street, John calls, "Sherlock, I'm off to work, go pick up some milk later?"

Sherlock is too busy holding all the blood in to reply.

He scrapes nails into the shirt covering his chest, drives knuckles into that hopelessly, helplessly empty space, presses the heels of his palms into where his heart used to be. It had run off a long time ago, and Sherlock had stumbled after it, tried to slow it down, tried to catch it in shaking, useless fingers.

It laughs and talks and makes tea now. Sometimes it wears nice shirts instead of horrible jumpers and goes out on nice dates with nice girls. Sometimes it brings that one particular nice girl back to their flat, over and over and over.

Sometimes, it goes shopping for three hours, and comes back with nothing but a satisfied/nervous grin and a tiny, tiny velvet box that Sherlock hates with all of his everything.

He wants to throw it in the sea, he wants to hide it in the goat stomach in the fridge. He wants to melt it down, until the liquid diamond flows into his palms and he can pretend the burns are his own vows. John would just get angry and buy another one.

Sherlock shrinks into a trembling curl of a man, tucked inside his soft, vulnerable shell like a dead turtle. He hits the ground and keeps going, sinking through as the water swirls and spins and fills everything, everything. Perhaps he'd make a few turns and get up in Australia. That would drive Mycroft insane.

He sinks. When he reaches the core of the Earth and the pressure in his chest doesn't fade, he sighs. Then he worries that he's just let out the last of the breath in his lungs. He gasps like a drowning man and rushes up through layers and layers of dirt and stone. Pebbles streak his skin in dusty, crude lines of morse code and he gasps, he _gasps_. It hurts.

He hurts.

The surface runs at him with a knife in hand; it slashes through his flesh and he slashes back.

The water pours into his mouth and throat and lungs and turns lighter than air, brings him through the ceiling and out, dripping fear and anxiety and agony down to where it splatters against the roof like blood or rain.

His arms and legs stretch out in the air. He laughs because his posture makes him a horizontal soldier. A soldier, just like his John.

As he rises, the blue of the sky turns darker. He reaches out and sweeps his fingertips along the edge of the atmosphere. When he looks at them, they are greyish-white with love. It collects there like dust. He brings them to his lips, and it reacts with the chemicals in his breath and combusts and the spitting flares stroke his cheek. It hurts, but he's ecstatic with the feel of being loved with a love so intense and volatile and encompassing that he can almost pretend it is John's.

It dissipates and he reaches out for more to fill tattered, parched veins but his body lurches back, and then he's falling.

The vertigo is appalling, and every particle of oxygen and hope gathers and whips a storm around him, as he plummets, dives, head first towards the doorstep of the house that is only his home as long as a certain army doctor lives there.

His skull will hit the pavement first. The brain will die before the heart, will be crumbled and ruined to give the heart a few more fractions of a second to live. That's how it always is.

"Sherlock, are you _still_ in there? Have you actually not moved in the past six hours?"

He feels like a corpse, smells pristine. Brilliant.

He has to speak or John will think he's accidentally knocked himself out or fallen asleep and flooded the bathroom. He doesn't want John to worry.

"Yes, sorry. Got lost in my mind palace. Thank you, I'll be out in a minute."

Of course, it's not the truth. His mind palace is far safer than matters of the Earth and his heart.

"Sure you're okay?"

No.

"Yes."

His voice is dry and rough at the edges and slices little paper cuts against his throat and tongue. The water stings the wounds as it drowns him.

John doesn't notice.

John laughs fondly and his soft footsteps fade.

Sherlock sits up, gathers his essential organs and bones and carefully places them inside his body.

He picks up his mind like a flower, tears off the petals stained red by sentiment. They flutter and dissolve in the tepid water, before sliding down the drain.When he slips it back inside his head, the cold is familiar and comforting.

He flicks the shower off. He's already feeling better. A trail of water follows him, but he's not going far, just the few steps to his bedroom. The water cools in his bespoke clothes.

He walks out without even glancing at the gap behind his ribs.


End file.
